Quote of the Day 16-06-06: Murray Bookchin

“As a result of this transfer, a theoretical corpus which was liberating a century ago is turned into a straitjacket today. We are asked to focus on the working class as the “agent” of revolutionary change at a time when capitalism visibly antagonizes and produces revolutionaries among virtually all strata of society, particularly the young. We are asked to guide our tactical methods by the vision of a “chronic economic crisis” despite the fact that no such crisis has been in the offing for thirty years,4 We are asked to accept a “proletarian dictatorship”–a long “transitional period” whose function is not merely the suppression of counter-revolutionaries but above all the development of a technology of abundance–at a time when a technology of abundance is at hand. We are asked to orient our “strategies” and “tactics” around poverty and material immiseration at a time when revolutionary sentiment is being generated by the banality of life under conditions of material abundance. We are asked to establish political parties, centralized organizations, “revolutionary” hierarchies and elites, and a new state at a time when political institutions as such are decaying and when centralizing, elitism and the state are being brought into question on a scale that has never occurred before in the history of hierarchical society.” -Murray Bookchin, Listen, Marxists!

(This line sums up a lot of the full text pretty well, the full text causing me to really rethink my political thoughts.)